It's demotivating to think that:

@cwebber Agreed. It’s making free and open source software development feel less rewarding. Less meaningful.

It's demotivating to think that:

- LLMs aren't good at producing original / novel work
- You still need experts to advance that stuff
- It will always be slower to move without using LLMs
- Once an innovation is done though, an innovation can always be scooped up by the LLM users
- "Bro why are you doing all this manually, I just vibe coded that in a weekend"

Will it always be this way? It's depressing in the meanwhile, at least.

@cwebber For what it’s worth I think that we are eventually going to recognize “needing to throw massive computation at things” as a symptom of language and discoverability shortcomings that we’ll find better ways to address. We already package utility up in libraries and deterministic generators, but finding and learning what resources do what remains difficult.

I think there’s still a better future out there where solving new problems is still a non-captured contribution to the common good.

@swift @cwebber @spritely the two sides of llms being fundamentally conservative—they entrench the past while making a different future more difficult

@cwebber im still resisting the belief that 'moving fast' is at all good or useful. sprinting is shitting out bad software to abandon next year, but most of us know that real value lies in the marathon of maintenance and careful conscious choices

@cwebber

Economic value which is indeed not the best way to measure value

Personally I have yet to see a product where the value is increased by LLM.

@cwebber LLM users are the same people who walk through modern art galleries saying "my kid could do that"

@alice @cwebber agreed. We’ve been doing a technical migration at my workplace and we keep finding more and more issues caused by people moving fast and hurrying in the previous migration years ago + in the updates and changes made during the use of the tool in question.

Time was supposedly saved back then, but it was actually just passed down the line for us to deal with now. And this wasn’t even with LLMs, just general tech and coding laziness around a big enterprise org.

@mariyadelano @alice @cwebber Most software is terrible. We build the same things over and over again, mostly poorly, and most people don't know any better. Even if you can see it, the tide is against you in most organizations. Is your NodeJS Kubernetes MongoDB Redis Temporal monstrosity 95% induced complexity and 99.9% wasted compute cycles and RAM? Sure. Can you practically change that? Not at most companies. Is this actually worse than writing it in vertically scaled Java on MySQL etc? Yes.

@mirth @mariyadelano @alice so wise let's not try doing better

@cwebber @mariyadelano @alice We absolutely should try to do better, and I appreciate everyone doing it. Every bit helps. My main point is the issues leading to slop proliferation are mostly structural and not new.

@mirth @cwebber @alice yep, what’s new with slop proliferation now, I think, is mostly the speed and scale of it.

@mariyadelano @cwebber @alice The speed is breathtaking. In the hands of very skilled engineers the coding tools can enable amazing technical feats but that raises more ethical and power concentration concerns. I've started following the development pretty closely and I think most people underestimate the danger. Not of the "paperclip factory" narrative but a much more mundane structural reduction in white collar jobs, followed by 100%+ accrual of the savings to the investor class.

@mariyadelano @cwebber @alice The speed is breathtaking. In the hands of very skilled engineers the coding tools can enable amazing technical feats but that raises more ethical and power concentration concerns. I've started following the development pretty closely and I think most people underestimate the danger. Not of the "paperclip factory" narrative but a much more mundane structural reduction in white collar jobs, followed by 100%+ accrual of the savings to the investor class.